I have a DVD-rom drive, a VGA monitor, motherboard, cpu, everything except the harddrive. Is there anyway to hotwire it to play dvd directly onto the screen? if there is a topic, please point. ill be searching.

I have a DVD-rom drive, a VGA monitor, motherboard, cpu, everything except the harddrive. Is there anyway to hotwire it to play dvd directly onto the screen? if there is a topic, please point. ill be searching.

Not that I know of. This is because the DVD drive doesn't know how to decode the video that is on the disk. This is all done in software.

You may not need a hard drive though. If you do it right you should be able to boot from a CD and load a light weight OS with a DVD player in RAM. Then when booted just swap the OS disk with your movie. Of course that would be harder than scavenging a 10GB dive that someone doesn't need anymore.